'They were about cricket subjects and about politics and about characters. With some of my political poems it is probably best they are never seen in public!

'But in the case of Colin l am pleased to share it. We were very close friends and used to get together for whiskies almost on a weekly basis.

'l first had the idea of writing about him while l was still PM. My poem was completed after Colin died in December 2000.'

Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society, praised it as a 'heartfelt elegy' for the cricketer, written in an imaginative and accessible style.

She suggested that the poem's conclusion, that it is how you play rather than your results that matter, might also be a justification of Sir John's Premiership, which ended in a crushing electoral defeat by Tony Blair in 1997.

She added: 'It would be great if we had more politicians actively participating in our cultural life.

'To write poetry you need to have an attentiveness to life and a wish to communicate - skills that are also good in a politician.'

The son of a trapeze artist who also ran a garden gnome firm, John Major won a place at Rutlish Grammar School, in Merton, South London, but hated it and left school at 16 with only three O-levels.

After being elected to Parliament in 1979, he rose through the ranks, becoming Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and eventually Prime Minister in 1990.

Sir John showed flashes of poetic language during his time in Downing Street, famously describing Britain as a country of 'long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist'.

The only previous verse by Sir John to be published was a fourline fragment from a poem entitled 'Cricket Prayer' which describes his desperation not to have to leave a Test match before the close of play.

Sir John said he chose to publish his poem now because he was such close friends with the late cricketer, and he wishes Lord Cowdrey's son Christopher to put it to good use by auctioning copies through his company FunRaising Events.

The reason that 307 are to be sold is that this was Colin Cowdrey's highest first-class score.